There are many of science-related places in the virtual world of Second Life, (SL) ranging from awesome to stupid. I maintain a list of them all. That list currently has 46 places on it. You might get a different count, because it isn’t always clear if one place should qualify as two or more. Also, there are some places which maybe shouldn’t be on the list, but it’s still early days so I just try to be thorough. I also might be missing some places.

You can get my latest list by going to the Science Center in Second Life and clicking on the sign that says “Click for a list of science-related places in SL”. That sign can be found at various other science-related places too, including the cafe on the Second Nature sim (one of the two sims being developed by Nature Publishing Group).

To give you a feel for some of the places, here are some snapshots.

(More text follows the break…)

The US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration Earth System Research Laboratory (NOAA ESRL) has a sim in SL named Meteroa, with many exhibits and activities relating to their work. Above is a photo of their live 3D map of the weather in the US, updated every seven minutes or so. NOAA will be expanding to more sims in the near future.

The International Spaceflight Museum has two sims in SL, named Spaceport Alpha and Spaceport Bravo. There are spacecraft and rockets from around the world, including life-sized models of Voyager, Magellan and Cassini-Huygens.

The Exploratorium, a hands-on science center in San Francisco, has two sims in Second Life. The most-developed one is named SploLand. They have a huge variety of exhibits.

CalTech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory got a sim (named Explorer Island) not too long ago, but there’s already lots to see there, including a life-size model of the proposed Terrestrial Planet Finder. I had no idea how huge it would be until I saw the model in SL. The photo above shows a model of one of JPL’s earliest rocket testing areas.

The sim named Genome is the effort of Dr. Mary Anne Clark, a Professor of Biology at Texas Wesleyan University. Above is a photo of a recreation of the Abbey where Gregor Mendel did much of his work on genetics.

The sim named Science School is associated with the University of Denver and has dozens of science-related exhibits. The photo above shows some exhibits which illustrate various kinds of telescopes (and which were made by SL resident Roger Amdahl).

Copyright © 2007 by T. Troy McConaghy.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License